ChiGoose

Looks like it might still be contested but from what I’ve read, Ukraine executed a feint to draw the Russians in and then Ukraine successfully counterattacked and is continuing to push them back.

I don’t personally know, but potentially to cause enough disruption to prevent certification that day and give people like John Eastman more time to make legal arguments. Or maybe it’s nothing! But it’s insane to not even look into it. I see no reason to believe the QAnon Shaman was part of a plan. He was likely just another poor mark who got swept up into the fervor. Agreed. Me too.

Well, if that’s all there is, the hearings will certainly be a dud. But if they have evidence of a plot to prevent certification or that those with authority to call in help to stop the insurrection intentionally did not do so, then we should see it. And that kind of evidence wouldn’t be something seen on Capitol security cameras.

Was there an organized plan to prevent the certification of the election, and if so, who was involved and what role did they play? While most of the people there were likely just swept up into the rally fervor, it is important to know if there were people who actually planned to prevent certification and what actions they took.

Where have I advocated for that?

It is incredibly material if suicide is attempted with a firearm because firearms are far more lethal than other methods. People who survive an attempt generally do not die of suicide. Most of the common methods of suicide (pills, cutting, etc.) are far more likely to fail than succeed. Suicide attempts with firearms are almost always successful (~90%). So that means that the method of a suicide attempt has a strong impact on the likelihood someone will die. While the common trope is that people who commit suicide are suffering from prolonged depression, suicide attempts generally occur in a brief moment of crisis. They snap and then make the attempt. If they have access to a gun, they most likely will die. If not, there is a very good chance they won’t. Since suicides are roughly half of gun deaths, we definitely should consider them as part of any approach to reduction in gun violence.

I think there are still some unanswered questions (what was Trump doing during the attack?) and I’m curious to see what is in Mark Meadow’s texts. I am not going to draw any conclusions until we see the evidence but it’s surprising to me that people wouldn’t want to know what the committee has found.

Bingo. If you are going to deprive someone of their rights, there needs to be due process. That involves the judicial system, not just the cops.

There was an attempt to overthrow an election result based on conspiracies and a wild misreading of the law. The point of the investigation is to determine what exactly happened and how it can be prevented in the future. The video is good for going after the people in the crowd but it is important to know if there was an actual plot to storm the Capitol, and if so, who was involved. That takes more than cameras. It takes investigation, interrogations, charging the small fish to get them to roll on bigger fish, etc. I’m not going to pretend to know if there was some grand conspiracy that rolls up to Trump (“We finally got him!” -Some Libs for the 20th time…) but we exist as a nation because of the peaceful transition of power. People tried to prevent it in 2020 and it would be good to know how to shut that down in the future.

Yes, the Carter Page FISAs were flawed and the IG admonished the FBI for screwing them up. It showed poor judgment by the investigators and deficient procedures around FISA applications that will hopefully be rectified. But as I stated previously, even if you throw out absolutely everything related to Carter Page, you would still have tons of connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And you would still have the investigation because it did not start with the Steele Dossier and Page. As to Misfud, I'm happy to stipulate that he wasn't acting on behalf of the Russians. Maybe he was talking out of his a$$ or maybe Papadopoulos misunderstood what he said. In any event, you have a member of the Trump campaign claiming to be in contact with the Russians who want to damage the Clinton campaign. That has to be investigated! It would be completely irresponsible NOT to investigate it. If there was truly nothing there, that would have been the end of it. Just like the Alfa Bank claim by Sussman: the FBI looks into it, determines there really isn't anything there, and closes it out. Instead, what they found is that the Trump campaign was absolutely crawling with Russian connections. That's why it turned into a big investigation, because as soon as they started looking, they found tons of connections.

Investigations take time. Especially when witnesses don't cooperate. Taking the time to do a thorough investigation is better than rushing through it. That being said, there's a hard stop they need to account for because the GOP will shut down the committee in January in the very likely event that they take the House.

Ok, I have tried to discuss this in good faith. You asked me to read the IG report's executive summary, so I did. When I talked about what it said, you laughed at it as being unbelievable (despite having asked me to read it in the first place). You clearly have no idea how the FBI or investigations or campaign opposition research works. And despite me trying to stick to primary sources and evidence, you continue to make completely unsubstantiated claims to seem to have arisen from some online fever swamp completely removed from reality. Look at all of the claims you've made with absolutely zero citation to evidence. Given the quality of the claims, I would imagine such citations would be from incredibly dubious sources. At the start of this Sussman trial, I laid down a marker on what would make me change my mind. I thought the case was weak but if Sussman was convicted and then Durham started getting convictions up the chain, I would reconsider my position. When Sussman was acquitted, this apparently became evidence not that the case was weak, but that the grand Clinton conspiracy went even deeper. Clinton is apparently the kind of person who can control the entire FBI (I guess she wanted the Comey letter?), DC juries, the justice system, basically everything she touches, but still lost the election? It seems much more likely that the FBI was investigating Russian connections with the Trump campaign because there were just so many different Russian connections to the Trump campaign. I don't know what the media diet is of the people on this board, but given these wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that fly in the face of evidence and logic (as well as the constant citing to the freaking Federalist), it's clear that we do not live in a shared reality and I find that sad. So many people just point to what media outlets and political actors claim and ignore that underlying facts. It makes serious discussion next to impossible. Also, I say all of this as someone who did NOT vote for Clinton and was still a Republican in 2016. I don't know what happened to the party but dear lord am I glad I left it.

Stronger controls around straw purchases. Our background check and gun tracing programs leave a lot to be desired and have loopholes that facilitate interstate gun trafficking. If we had a system where we had close to a 100% success rate in taking a gun used in a crime in Chicago and tracing it all the way back to the specific individual who purchased it and where they purchased it, that would allow us to prosecute the straw purchaser and potentially the store (if it did not comply with regulations). These actions would reduce the availability of guns to criminals through straw purchasers.

I don't think there is a panacea, nor do I think you can prevent all gun violence. But generally, I would start by treating firearms like we do cars. We used to have far more automobile deaths in this country, but with stricter controls on how people can be licensed to drive and regulations around vehicle safety, we have dramatically reduced the number of people being killed by cars. Red flag laws are a good place to start, too. If someone presents a threat to the community, there should be a process from temporarily removing their firearms. We also should repeal PLCAA, which prevents gun manufacturers from being sued. If you remember the Ford Pinto, it had a design flaw that resulted in a higher risk of fire in a rear-end collision. Through lawsuits and public advocacy, the issue was identified and Ford issued a recall. Since gun manufacturers are immune to lawsuits due to PLCAA, they are less inclined to have a focus on safety in their designs. Colt was in the process of creating the iColt handgun in the 1990's, which was a smart gun that could only be fired by its owner. This plan was scrapped and the gun was never rolled out. Manufacturers would have an incentive to explore safer approaches to firearms if they could be liable for excessively lethal weapons. I think we should also have safe gun storage laws to prevent kids or other people from getting an otherwise legally obtained gun. Gun safes with the ammunition stored separately would be a good approach, especially in houses where minors live. I am skeptical of outright bans of guns, like the AR-15. "Assault Weapon" is a political term that is often defined around a gun's cosmetic features than its lethality. If there is a case to be made to ban certain types of firearms because they are so high power as to not have a real justifiable civilian use, I'm open to hearing it. But I don't think we should ban guns because they look scary or are popular. Something we need to do but I have no idea how to do is to change the culture around guns. It was not that long ago that guns, especially rifles, were more considered tools than anything else. Going to a range to safely use your firearm, having a gun in a rural area to protect from certain wildlife, etc. I took some NRA classes way back when and the number one thing was safety and respect for the deadly weapon in your hands. Today, it's all about 2A and tyranny and the ads for guns invoke images of violence and being manly. I think that changes the way some people look at guns and it's not good.

The FBI data doesn't go into that much detail, but most homicides via firearms are by handgun. We generally only talk about gun violence after mass shootings, which are disproportionately via rifle (like the AR-15) but if we actually want to do something to reduce gun deaths, we need to also focus on handguns, suicides and accidental gun deaths.

Correct. Here are the numbers as of 2019 (the most recent FBI crime data I could pull up) Gary, Indiana has a population of 75,000 and had 57 homicides in 2019 (FBI data table for Indiana) for a homicide rate of 76 homicides per 100,000 people. Chicago has a population of 2,707,064 and had 492 homicides in 2019 (FBI data table for Illinois) for a homicide rate of 18 homicides per 100,000 people. Gary, Indiana has a much higher homicide rate than Chicago and that violence gets exported to Chicago through guns moving into the city. Chicago gets all of the national headlines because the sheer total is large due to the size of the population. But depending how you define "city" (in terms of population and boundaries), Chicago is far from the most deadly city in the US. Here's one listing from last year that has Chicago in 10th, with a homicide rate that's a little more than 1/3rd the rate of St. Louis: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-with-most-murders

I'd have to disagree here. Living here in Chicago, around 60% of the guns used for crimes here were obtained outside of the state. Illinois and Chicago can put in whatever stringent gun laws they want but people can drive a couple miles out of the city to Gary, Indiana, load up on guns and bring them into Chicago. Despite this, Indiana is not acting to reduce the gun trafficking nor enacting stricter controls on gun sales. If we don't take a comprehensive approach across the country, we will continue to have problems with people obtaining guns in less restrictive states and bringing them into more restrictive states to circumvent the laws.

That's the kind of high powered legal team that can come in to defend you for a traffic ticket and accidentally get you the death penalty.

Some of the same politicians saying teachers are harming kids with CRT and grooming them for pedophiles also argue that we should give the teachers guns. Doesn't make much sense to me. I think not having guns in a classroom is definitely preferable to asking our teachers to do everything they are currently doing AND carry firearms. I think your second point here is important but often gets overlooked. We cannot stop every mad person from acting on their desire for violence. However, we can work to reduce the lethality of them doing so. A country in which there is easy and affordable access to mental health resources AND strong checks against who can own firearms and how they are stored is a country that would see fewer mass casualty events than we have today. Ideally, it would reduce suicides as well. If someone wants to kill a bunch of people but can't get a firearm, they can still do a lot of damage with something like the aforementioned hammer. But you're not going to have mass hammering death events every day like we do with guns right now. I also doubt 19 cops would be too scared to go into a classroom that had a madman with a hammer instead of one with a gun. Also, if someone wants to commit suicide but they cannot get a firearm, they will have to try something less lethal, increasing the odds that they survive the attempt and don't end up killing themselves.

...because that's not the main cause for gun violence?

Red flag laws are a relatively new development, so only ~9 states currently have them. I would expect we see more states enact them in the coming years. Also, not all red flag laws are equal. New York has one but it clearly failed to prevent the Buffalo shooting despite the gunman having previously been reported for threatening violence. When enacting a red flag law, states should look to see what has and has not worked with similar laws in other states to make their laws better.

I think this "us vs them" talk is not only problematic in that it does not facilitate actual discussion, but it's also dangerous because it drives us to our own sides and leads to demonizing anyone who doesn't agree with us as "them." It also allows for us to take any member of the "them" group and ascribe their belief to everyone in that group even if the group as a whole does not agree. A good example of this is the mask mandate claim here. I have not seen anyone in a position of authority advocating that we require everyone be masked forever. I am sure there are some people somewhere who have expressed that belief, but it is not a mainstream position of the Left. However, by making this claim, we can simply smear anyone on the other side as being unreasonable and dismiss anything they have to say. It would be like taking the words of an extremist on the Right and saying everyone on the Right is a neo-nazi white supremacist ("They want to disadvantage minorities. They believe being white is superior..." etc). It's not true. There are some that may express that view but that's not the actual policy of the Right. But I could make that claim, point to someone who fits that profile and feel like I've made my point that my group is superior to their group. Not only does it not get us anywhere, but it actually pushes us apart and makes things worse. Let's be better than this.

Do those factors correlate with firearm deaths? Do we have data on that? Just a quick look shows we have only a slightly higher rate of single parent household than the UK (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/12/12/religion-and-living-arrangements-around-the-world/ ), but the UK does not have a similar rate of firearm deaths.

If this was true, we would see the same rate of gun deaths in peer countries, but we don't. So, it's either: The availability / accessibility of guns; or Americans are inherently inferior to people like Canadians and the British I really don't think it's the latter...

The NRA used to actually propose gun control legislation because as the experts on guns, they knew what laws would be effective for preventing guns from getting in the wrong hands while maintaining the ability for upstanding citizens to safely own firearms. Now that the NRA exists solely as the lobbying arm of gun manufacturers, we no longer have a large organization of firearm experts lobbying for safe gun laws. Which means that if we ever get to a boiling point and the country actually decides to do *something* about the insane number of gun deaths, those laws will likely be written by people who lack the expertise to make them as effective as they can be. I'm not convinced banning the AR-15 will do a whole lot since there are plenty of other semi-automatic rifles out there, but if we get to a point where Congress actually passes something, I'd bet an AR-15 ban would be part of that. The fact that most gun deaths are suicides I think underscores even more that we need effective firearm legislation. Most people who survive a suicide attempt do not end up dying of suicide. They end up moving on and leading a normal life. And most methods of suicide attempts (pills, cutting, etc) are far more likely to fail than succeed. But somebody who attempts suicide with a gun is about 90% certain to die. If they did not have access to that weapon in that brief moment, they more likely than not would not have died. Better laws around simple things like gun storage and red flag laws would likely go a long way here. And I completely agree that we should focus more on handguns. We talk more about rifles because they are used in the kinds of shootings that make the headlines, but the overwhelming majority of gun deaths are by handgun. I would be in favor of handguns being far more regulated / restricted than rifles.